Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada…

 

We left the Cinderella Motel and Campground later than planned since it was raining  that morning. When the rain let up right after lunch we hit the road to take the RV over to Colton RV in Tonawanda, New York to get a solar panel installed. We pulled into their courtesy site and packed up the car for our four day mini-vacation to Niagara Falls, Ontario.

As we arrived at the Rainbow Bridge which crosses over to Canada we had to pay a toll and then we queued up in one of the many Canadian customs lines.  After presenting our passports and answering a few questions about what we were going to do in Canada, what we had in our car,  how long we were staying and whether or not we were bringing guns into the country we were given our passports back and waved into the country. We did claim the 18 pack of Labatt's Blue Beer and two bottles of wine with no worries from the customs folks.

As we entered we turned off our cell phones ability to bounce off cell towers in the USA (*228 option 2 as per Verizon’s request) this would give us the ability to use our phones in our temporary USA plus Canada Verizon plan.  This plan however would only give us the ability to text (unlimited) but phone calls or data would be really pricey.  Our next step was to uncheck all data reception in our settings and we were ready for Canada.  As we looked at our Garmin after crossing into Canada it suddenly struck that I had never loaded the Canadian Maps into our GPS as the only thing that showed up in Canada on the GPS was a white background for Canada… Yikes! So we drove around Niagara Falls for a while until we stumbled onto to Stanley Street where we found the Ramada Inn where we were staying.

Once we got checked in and settled into our room we of course had a few of those Labatt’s we brought along.  Happily the hotel room had a mini fridge to store the others.  We then walked the four blocks down the hill to where we were treated to our first view of the American Falls. For those that have never been to Niagara Falls it is composed of three falls, the smallest one is Bridal Veil Fall, the next largest one is the American Falls, and the largest one is called Horseshoe Falls. When we were looking at the American Falls we didn’t know we were also looking at Bridal Veil Falls as it is the falls slightly separated to the right side from the larger body of falls..

Wow these are some very impressive falls so we really couldn’t imagine seeing the larger Horseshoe Falls. The lighting is ever changing on the falls and as a result you find yourself taking 100’s of photos because every time we took a picture we would look up to see another stunningly beautiful sight. After we got our fill of the beauty of the American Falls we ambled our way along the guard rail and rock wall toward the larger falls. As we approached Horseshoe Falls the roar of the water was getting louder but the thing we saw initially was a large cloud of mist that comes up from the crashing waters below the falls. Then we saw the sight that stopped us in our tracks… WOW!!!

No doubt this is one of the seven natural wonder’s of the world… the misty cloud lingered in the middle of the falls on this day and as the light changed we saw various fragments of rainbows in the mist. The power of the water going over the edge is impressive to say the least. We stayed and watched Horseshoe Falls into the evening when at 9pm the Falls were lit as they do every night with spotlights What an awesome scene we shared with an eclectic crowd from countries all over the world.  Feeling awed but tired, we then made our way back up the the steep hill and the four blocks back to the hotel.

A pretty fabulous start to our mini-vacation….